[Freeciv-Dev] Re: next beta

[Andreas Røsdal <andrearo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:
> > Maybe PR#8818 can be looked at again?
> >
> > To summarize it: change the fog of war to darken the whole tile,
> > instead of making every other tile black. This causes flickering when
> > sliding the map on an LCD montor.
> >
> > Take a look at this screenshot of Civ3 fog of war, for an example:
> > http://img.gamershell.com/imagefolio/gallery/Strategy/Civilization_3/tanks.jpg
>
> For that you need alpha blending. The standard X11 API does not support
> alpha blending (Win32 GDI on Windows 2000 does however). A solution would
> be for someone to make an OpenGL port of the map drawing code. I tried,
> but my code was too slow.

I think that alpha blending in the GTK 2.x client should be possible.
The GdkPixbuf function gdk_pixbuf_render_to_drawable_alpha() allows you
to set an alpha threshold for the pixbuf you want to render. There is also
a lot of other rendering functions which take alpha threshold values. So,
can this be used to add alpha blending to the GTK 2.x client?  Even the
examples which come with the GTK distribution have alpha blending.
(gtk-pixbuf example).

A OpenGL client, or a way to do alpha-blending in the common code would be
even better.

I don't know how the standard X11 API is used in the clients. Why would
you want to use it for alpha blending anyway?

Andreas Røsdal